Pages

Oct 26, 2011

Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

Posted by
Siddharth Kaushal

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works in this fascinating TEDtalk.

The Barefoot College has one mission: to provide basic services and solutions in rural communities with the objective of making them self-sufficient. These “barefoot solutions” can be broadly categorized into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development. The Barefoot College education program, for instance, teaches literacy and also skills, encouraging learning-by-doing. (Literacy is only part of it.) Bunker’s organization has also successfully trained grandmothers from Africa and the Himalayan region to be solar engineers so they can bring electricity to their remote villages. As he says, Barefoot College is "a place of learning and unlearning: where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher."

Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy (born 2 August 1945) is an Indian social activist and educator. He was selected as one of Time 100, the 100 most influential personalities in the world by TIME Magazine in 2010.